


This House Loves You

by adreadfulidea



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Gothic, Hauntings, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:08:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26810413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adreadfulidea/pseuds/adreadfulidea
Summary: Thomas Barrow meets his match.
Comments: 24
Kudos: 41





	This House Loves You

**Author's Note:**

> Things you will find in this fic: suicidal ideation, fairly gross discussion of bodily disintegration and mysterious ill health, and descriptions of starvation that may be triggering for those with eating disorders.

Downton Abbey was an old pile of rocks. Carson could rattle off the history by memory if prompted and Thomas tried to be out of earshot when he did, but he picked up the particulars in spite of himself: that it had been a monastery before they were dissolved, and then a playground for the king (and his mistresses; Carson never mentioned that part), before passing into the most ancient hands of the Crawleys, who surely must have been called something else back then. An old house for an old family; as though there were any such thing as a new family, as though even the meanest hall boy didn’t have bloodlines stretching back into antiquity.

Those were the stories that made the family registers, but there were others, ones about mad nuns and murders and spirits that walked the halls. The kind that bored servants made up to tell around the kitchen table to distract themselves from the fact that they’d be folding some knob’s socks well into their nineties. To spice up the place. A lot of rot, in other words.

Thomas gave them the credence they were worth: nothing. He didn’t believe in ghosts. He’d been living in the Abbey for years and had never seen so much as a white fog in one of the hallways. All the house contained was shadows, and silence.

The age of the place did make it cold, however, no modern conveniences here. In the winter Thomas liked to wake early and go sit by the fire in the kitchen before anyone else was up and about. It gave him some peace and some warmth he didn’t have to share. He’d read his newspaper and make himself a cup of tea—Mrs Patmore had given up trying to keep him out of it—and enjoy having the place to himself for the moment. He was doing exactly that when he felt a prickle across the back of his neck. It was the kind that was supposed to happen when someone was watching you.

Thomas looked back over his shoulder slowly, keeping his face blank, refusing to give anyone who might have the bright idea of popping out of a corner to scare him the satisfaction. “Hullo?” he said.

There was of course no one there. Only the cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling and his own imagination. Of course there was no one watching.

Listening, he thought. Not watching. You need eyes to see.

Abruptly, his fingers went numb around his teacup. He couldn’t hold on. It smashed against the floor.

“Oh, Thomas!” Mrs Patmore cried, coming through the doorway. “You gave me a fright! Clean that up right away, I’ve breakfast to start.”

“Of course,” said Thomas. It would strike him as strange, later, that he didn’t argue, that he didn’t have anything to say for himself at all.

He was only a little tired, that was all. Or at loose ends. He couldn’t seem to summon up his old energy or any of his plans. He should have been able to—should have wanted to. With Jimmy gone there wasn’t a single reason to stay at Downton, in a place where nothing belonged to him and no one liked him.

Maybe it was getting older that kept him stuck. There was grey coming out in his hair now. The winters seemed harder than they once were, the days longer. He wasn’t sleeping well. He had dreams he couldn’t remember. He went to bed with an aching head more often than not. Some nights he needed a drink to sleep, and he’d never needed that, because he wasn’t one bit like his father and he’d made sure he never would be.

I used to be so sure of myself, he thought, and then: I used to know who I was.

Thomas stopped in the middle of the hallway, the tray he was carrying rattling in his hand. He’d been taking it to his lordship in the library. He pinched the bridge of his nose to clear his head.

He was on the wrong floor entirely. Standing by the window, looking out over the grounds. How had he gotten so turned around?

The window was covered with frost. The pattern looked like hands, like palms and fingers pressed against the glass. Thomas held his own up to it, hissing at the cold. It was exactly the right size.

An old friend wrote to him, one he hadn’t heard from in years. Phyllis Baxter. She’d been more of a sister to him than his sister. The letter said she’d fallen on hard times and she wondered if anyone in the household was in need of a ladies maid.

He sent her money, and told her no.

Sleep continued to evade him. When it came it was disturbed and broken; he dreamt of the house burning down and weeping over the ashes. He dreamt of walking the hallways until his feet bled, of climbing the stairs up and up and up into a darkness so thick and welcoming he never wanted to leave, and he awoke with his pillow wet with tears. He didn’t dream about the war any longer. His memories of that time were faded, flickering, a bad film reel. He didn’t dream about his father, not even the worst of him.

It made his temper short. He snapped at the hall boys and picked a fight with Alfred over breakfast. The voices of the others whined in his ears like a saw. Were they always this loud?

Carson cornered him halfway through an interminable Wednesday. “You don’t look well,” he said. “If you need to spend the morning in bed, please do so. I don’t want you passing anything on to the other servants.”

Thomas raised his head. Something in his expression made Carson go white. “It would be the other servants, wouldn’t it? Never me. I could disappear tomorrow and no one would notice.”

“Thomas,” said Carson, harshly. Embarrassment rolled over his sagging face like a stormcloud. No, distaste. “We have expectations in this household, and one of them is that you will behave yourself. Have you been spending your nights somewhere else?”

Thomas laughed. So that’s what this was about. Carson thought he was sneaking out at night like a naughty schoolboy. “Somewhere else?” he asked. “There is nowhere else.”

When he couldn’t take it any longer he slipped Lady Mary’s laudanum out of her nightstand, the bottle she’d been given after Mr Matthew had died, when she couldn’t sleep either and had drifted through the halls like a lost spirit. It was an absolute danger even being in her room but he couldn’t help it—there was no asking Anna for the stuff, she would think he had gone mad. And he needed it, he did, he had to get some sleep. There were bright lights at the corners of his vision, sparks of colour, things that disappeared when he turned his head. He thought he saw spiders in the corners of his room, thought he heard someone whisper his name from inside the closet. He had known men this happened to in the trenches. It didn’t end well for them.

Just a few nights. He only needed a few nights, and he would be right as rain.

It worked exactly as he hoped, pulling him into a dreamless and beautiful slumber. For one whole week, which was longer than he had planned to take it, but he was so exhausted the extension seemed to be necessary. One week, and then he woke up standing in front of Anna and Bates’ cottage.

His feet were bare in the snow and he was so cold he had gone numb. His pyjamas were no protection at all. He couldn’t stop shaking. A light turned on in the cottage, and a silhouette appeared in the window before he could flee.

Anna opened the door. Bates was behind her. “Thomas?” she asked. “My god, what are you doing here? You’re going to catch your death!”

“I must have been sleepwalking,” he said, or tried to say, but his teeth were chattering so badly he wasn’t sure if they understood him.

He was taken inside, given a blanket and hot tea. For once nobody accused him of anything untoward, but he couldn’t help hating the pity in their eyes.

Thomas spent the next day in bed, claiming to be sick, to have gotten a cold from his nocturnal wanderings. He pressed his fingers to the pulse on the inside of his wrist every few minutes, just like they taught him in the army, but it was as strong as it had ever been.

His appetite started to go. It happened on Christmas Eve, while he was eating Mrs Patmore’s fine holiday goose. It was the best meal they had all year, the only one they didn’t have to eat late because they’d been serving the family theirs. He looked forward to it all season. Everyone did.

The gifts were piled under a tree that Alfred and the boys had dragged back from town. They’d spent all yesterday evening decorating it, making popcorn balls and tying ribbons. Even Thomas had helped.

And he’d felt fine, honestly. Better than he’d been in ages. It must have been a passing illness, he thought, that left him so weak and so exhausted. He would come back as strong as ever.

He looked down at the goose on his plate and felt his stomach turn.

It was all flesh, everything they ate; veins and tendons and muscle, greasy and red. It was the same as a blown-open torso, the rotten bodies stuck where no one could get at them between the trenches. Death was stillness and peace and being with our Father, the Reverend of his childhood church used to say, but Thomas remembered the smell. Death was a disintegration. It was men crying out for an end to the pain, begging for their mothers, their lovers, their children. What had the goose thought about, when they were killing her?

The vegetables weren’t any better. They tasted like grit, like the dirt they had come from. The bread was dust in his throat; the water bitter. Had it been poisoned? He never tried the pudding. He’d gone to the bathroom by that point and sicked up what he had managed to force down.

“Alright?” Anna whispered, when he returned to the bowels of the house and to his place in them. “You left rather suddenly.”

“A bit too much port. That’s all.” He raised his glass to the rest of them, watched their good cheer at the gesture, and felt nothing at all.

Jimmy wrote him a letter. Plain paper, a postmark from Manchester. Thomas stared at the words, trying to make them make sense. He threw the letter into the fire and didn’t think about it any more.

Thomas had a dream. It was about Edward Courtenay, who was grappling with him, trying to move him somewhere. His eyes were a blank, shiny white. He put his mouth next to Thomas’ ear. “Run,” he said, and Thomas woke up.

He could force himself to eat, some of the time. Enough of the time. Bread and water primarily, tea, crackers and thin soup. The voice in his closet was back and louder this time. But kinder. Soft, like a mother’s call. They were starting to look at him like he was an invalid. When he put his hands on the walls of the house they were warm to the touch.

He was getting thinner, the veins standing out in his arms. Paler, too, with dark smudges under his eyes. It would have bothered him, once upon a time. He’d been vain about his looks. He could no longer recall why they had mattered to him at all. All that he was concerned with was getting through the day so that he could return to the peace of his room, to lay still and listen to the sounds of the house settling around him.

His scar started hurting. Little bits of pain, like touching a spark. Only in the morning, or at night. It itched like it was fresh. His hands went cold easily; he soaked them in hot water to warm them up. He drank cup after cup of scalding tea.

He went to the archives in the town on his half-day to look up the history of the Abbey. The man minding them—as dusty as his files, well into his seventies—told Thomas he could look at anything he liked. “So few show any interest,” he said, wistfully, and left Thomas to it.

Thomas didn’t know what he was looking for, only that there was something he had to find, something he ought to know. It reminded of the instinct they’d all claimed to develop during the war, the ability to detect some change in the air pressure before the whistle of the bullets came, to know when to duck. Though of course it had been a lie. Thomas never met a soldier who could hear his death moving towards him.

He looked through parish records, blueprints for renovations, and a suppressed record of Charles II’s cavorting about the countryside. Some of them smelled familiar, like the house: candle wax and cold stone and dusty carpet. None of it gave him what he needed.

“I don’t know what I thought I’d find,” Thomas said, out loud to himself. There was no one to answer but an echo. His head swam when he stood up, the room turning about him the way a carousel did. He crouched down, held on to the table leg and breathed through his mouth. It will get better, he thought, so much better. Every day I feel better.

The house was waiting for him to come home; he followed the path out of town as though being pulled on a string.

His hands stopped getting cold. They went numb instead, the scar as well. There was something black starting at the base of his fingernails, spreading through the nail beds. One of them came off as easily as a lost bandage. It didn’t hurt. He started wearing gloves all the time, not only on his bad hand. White, the kind that matched his uniform.

Faces watched from the ends of the hallways, peered at him in concern over the dinner table. He caught Mrs Hughes and Carson whispering furiously about something that stopped as soon as he entered the room. Daisy wouldn’t meet his eye. He skipped meals because their gazes were too heavy, too harsh, the light in the servant’s hall too bright. They left food outside his door.

He chipped his tooth on the spoon, he lost his tooth on the spoon, he looked down at his palm, blood running down his chin, at the tooth cupped there. Part of himself.

“What is _wrong_ with me?” he asked.

It was like cold water, or a slap in the face. He crept down to the bathroom to wash up. Not knowing what to do with it, he put the tooth in his pocket.

He retrieved his coat from his room and checked the clock in the servant’s hall. It was nearly midnight. Time, like everything else, felt like it was slipping through his fingers. He was going to wake Dr Clarkson up, but he couldn’t wait. He had never been fond of Thomas, no one was, but surely he would recognise a medical emergency when he saw one.

The doctor came to the door in a nightshirt and his housecoat, looking befuddled. He rubbed his eyes like a child. “Thomas?” he asked. “Has something gone wrong at the Abbey? Is it one of the family?”

“No,” Thomas said, trying to keep his voice steady. “It’s me. I’m...very ill. I don’t feel like myself at all, and—” he pulled his gloves off, showing Dr Clarkson the state of his hands. “And I’m losing teeth,” he said. He could taste the tin of the blood in his mouth still. It made his stomach churn.

“Come in,” Dr Clarkson said.

His little house was behind his clinic. They entered through the back door, with Dr Clarkson lighting the way by a lantern so he wouldn’t wake the patients. A nurse looked up in surprise as they came in, rising from her seat, but the doctor shook his head and she sat back down.

They ducked behind a curtain and Dr Clarkson turned on a lamp. Shock showed in his face as he looked at Thomas in the light. They hadn’t seen each other for some time; no one at the house had been in need of his services.

“Let’s take a look at you,” he said.

Thomas hated it; he had always hated going to the doctor, the loss of privacy, the cold and clinical touch. He pressed his teeth together and endured the examination, the drawing of blood, the rounds of questions. He hated everything that had brought him here, with no control over himself and something going wrong inside.

“I’m going to send your blood samples to a laboratory in London,” Clarkson said. “I’ll admit this isn’t anything I recognise, but we shouldn’t give up yet. How do you feel, on a day to day basis?”

“Like I’m being punished by God,” Thomas said.

Dr Clarkson’s expression softened. “Thomas,” he said. “God has nothing to do with any of this. You’ve just been unlucky.”

Unlucky since birth. Unlucky in love, Unlucky in life. Unlucky when the results came back from the London lab, showing nothing amiss at all.

Dr Clarkson told Thomas to eat and sleep more. He gave him a wash of iodine for his hands, Salvarsan in case he had an infection, morphine for pain. He didn’t understand that Thomas wasn’t being hurt; he was disintegrating like salt in water. Soon there would be nothing left of him at all. Dr Clarkson wanted to send him to a specialist in London. He started to look at Thomas with grim resignation, the way men watched the dead and the dying.

If Thomas had wanted kindness, if he had wanted care, if he had wanted to be treated with deference, then he had it; he had it just as it didn’t matter any longer.

Anna never encountered him without a sad smile. She insisted he take walks in the garden with her, for his constitution. The snow had faded and green shoots were working their way up from the muddy ground. She kept her hand on his arm when they went out as though he needed her to steady him or keep him upright. Carson dropped his eyes when Thomas looked at him. Even Bates, that old enemy, insisted on lifting what he couldn’t. He was put on partial duty, and then none at all. No one expected anything from him anymore.

Carson asked a few halting questions about his family. If there was anyone he should write to.

“I have no family,” Thomas said, with a smile.

He lost more weight. He couldn’t fathom why that was such a concern; he was light as a feather, he’d never felt better in his life. He didn’t need anything at all, not the perfectly tasteless food on his plate, not the draughts forced on him by Dr Clarkson.

Once, all he had was breakfast in the servant’s hall, the path between his room and the kitchen, the village and what small pleasures it contained on a half-day. He could count his footsteps, feel the way his hopes had soaked into the skin of the walls. A hope for a laugh or a smile from Jimmy, a hope for an easy day and an early night, a hope for a bit of gossip he could use or a bottle of wine he could knick. He had been so small, so unimportant. All his lost futures, so carefully mapped out, so easily destroyed. He was free of it all.

He thought, for the first time in a very long time, of O’Brien, her short-tempered face drifting across his mind. There was no sting in the memory. He felt a great tenderness towards her, a great pity, a pity for them all; scuttling through the arteries of the house without any idea at all what it was that they served. They were insects, ants, mice; they hadn’t been chosen, not like he had.

And they thought he was dying! Dying, when he’d never been more alive.

They had the house all wrong. They saw stone and wood and glass. Only Thomas knew the truth of it. He could see the ribs that held the ceiling up, could taste the salt of the blood that came from the taps, that rushed through the blue veins in the roof. When he touched the joints, the places that the unchosen called corners, he could feel the ichor that pulsed through them.

He could hear its music all the time, now. He didn’t even have to try.

“The hum,” he said to the others, interrupting their meal. “Do you feel it?”

Daisy wouldn’t look up at him. Her fork scraped along her plate; playing with her food, like a little girl. “I don’t know what you mean. Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

“It sings,” Thomas said. “I wish you could hear it. I wish that for all of you.”

“Thomas,” said Anna, in a low and terrible voice. “You’re bleeding.”

So he was, streaming down from his nose, dripping onto the table. He touched it with wondering fingers.

His knuckles started to swell, and then his ankles and finally his knees. It looked absurd on legs that were no more than sticks, but no one thought it was funny but him. The thing in his closet was getting darker and larger. Sometimes it squatted down like a toad, sometimes it stretched all the way across the ceiling. He could smell the mildew, the beautiful rot. He stopped closing his eyes. They burned like he was stepping into a freezing wind. He was so close. Only a few more days, he thought.

He fell down the stairs. Daisy screamed. She covered her face. She couldn’t accept what he was. It was Bates that brought him back up to his bed, and it was Anna who tended to him. That was appropriate. He didn’t bear them any ill will, not any longer. It was good that they knew that.

“Thomas,” Anna said. Her hand was on his arm again. “John is going for the doctor. We’re going to send you to hospital.”

“Don’t you hear the heart?” Thomas asked her. “I gave it my teeth and my blood and I’ll give it more. It’s beating, Anna.”

Anna’s mouth was trembling, pulled into a tight line. “Yes, dear,” she said. “For a little while, at least.”

“She doesn’t understand,” said Thomas, to the thing in the closet. “Make her look. Make her see.” But she couldn’t see, none of them could see the way Thomas did. There were others who had gone before him, who would come after him. They were lined up neat and still. Faces turned to the wall. Waiting for him. He would never be alone again.

Anna left the room. She was talking to someone outside of it, but her voice was as distant as the moon in the sky. Anna thought she was going to send him away. She didn’t know about the razor in his nightstand, the one that he could still lift and that felt so cool against his wrists. Why would he let anybody take him away from the only place he had ever belonged?

**Author's Note:**

> This story was inspired by such classics as The Yellow Wallpaper and The Haunting of Hill House (book, rather than any filmed adaptation) as well as the difference between a haunted house and a haunting house, with both Hill House and Downton Abbey being the latter. Happy Halloween everyone /l\\(^w^)/l\\!


End file.
